codinginmysleep.com Archives - 14 March 2013, Thursday

As part of the settlement, the wording in most credit card acceptance policies barring customer-facing surcharges has been removed and merchants are now explicitly allowed to charge their customers any amount up to the actual fee they’re paying to swipe their card. Despite bearing sim...

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Within the Bitcoin community, payment processor Dwolla was pretty popular in its time. They were the preferred method of getting into and out of Bitcoin from the U.S. Dollar specifically because they claimed zero chance of chargebacks and appeared to be a small business run by decent ...

It’s been a slow couple of months here at Coding In My Sleep – between the Bitcoin world taking a much-needed breather (read: nothing much happened) and my personal life exploding/imploding (read: bought a house) I have not been my usual post-a-day self. Well today I break that streak...

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It’s no secret that Bitcoin merchant services company WalletBit has been hard at work putting Bitcoin into the hands of merchants everywhere. Their mobile point of sale system works pretty much everywhere you can find a processor and an internet connection and makes Bitcoin transactio...

Earlier today, Antivirus maker Trend Micro informed the world via blog post that a Trojan disguised as a component of their own virus scanning software was dropping “Bitcoin-Mining Malware.” Other news sites have been quick to follow and of course it’s making the rounds on the forums ...

Look out MtGox , Bitcoin-Central just beat you to one hell of a punch. While this may not mean a lot to my American readers, those of you across the pond in various parts of Europe will be excited to hear that popular European Bitcoin exchange Bitcoin-Central just became the first suc...

There’s been a lot of chatter lately about the block reward halving and the effect it will have on nearly every aspect of Bitcoin. The halving mechanism is a very important part of Bitcoin’s functionality, ensuring that over time the inflation rate decreases to zero and creating the h...

There has been a lot of chatter lately about an impending event that represents a drastic change in the world of Bitcoin: In about 3 days the block reward is going to be cut in half from 50 BTC to 25. While it’s immediately obvious that this has potentially severe implications for min...

Bitcoin Friday was great for us! We kicked it off by driving down to Philly to host a Bitcoin table at the biggest regional conference for libertarian students in history. The students loved it, and ran the gamut from Bitcoin experts to many who had never heard the word before. Invari...

I'm not normally one to delve too deeply into the world of financial charts, math and indices - oh I can read all variety of charts just fine and make arbitrary speculative guesses with the best of them, but I've seldom considered myself clever enough to make any attempt at inventing ...

It's long been touted by the Bitcoin community that the lack of chargeback risk and transaction fees would expose merchants to less cost that they would have to pass on to the consumer, thereby lowering prices. The problem, thus far, has been that most of the merchants adopting Bitcoi...

Bankers Understand the Offense, But Not Defense American Banker recently ran an interesting article about the attack patterns of many recent hacks as they apply to the banking industry. They hit the nail on the head with regard to the attack pattern, but seem to miss the point when it...

Even under horrifically inappropriate circumstances, we humans experience a strange emotion the Germans call schadenfreude - pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. Perhaps it's the optimistic bit of our brain trying to find a silver lining or a natural defense mechanism to k...

WalletBit/ResponsePay has just released a new checkout method that makes it even easier for your business to integrate Bitcoin payments, accept Bitcoin payments on-the-go or even perform OTC transactions in person. The new Point of Sale Mobile Checkout allows you to select any local c...

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As many in the Bitcoin community are well aware, Butterfly Labs is on the verge of releasing a new line of ASIC-based Bitcoin mining devices. For a long time we've been seeing mockups and renders of PCBs and cases (like the one to the left). Recently Bitcoin Magazine published the fir...

Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love market fundamentals. An interesting thing is happening in the Bitcoin community of late. We've always been a naturally suspicious lot, questioning the motives and track record of anyone or anything placed before us, but lately these suspicio...

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The Difficulty With Bitcoin Stats There has been a lot of news lately surrounding a certain study (PDF warning) funded by Citi. The study attempted analysis of the Bitcoin block chain for a number of purposes and came up with a few startling numbers that a lot of the "mainstream media...

To understand ultraprune, we have to understand a few things about how Bitcoin actually works. Bitcoin, technically, is less like a currency and more like a ledger. Bitcoin keeps track of every transaction everyone makes and stores it in a database, commonly referred to as the "block ...

Bitcoin Savings & Trust fiasco here before, but for the most part I've left the topic alone. This in large part because I like to source my information properly and frankly there just isn't that much (reliable) information about PirateAt40 and his scheme floating around. The sole exce...

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At this point in the article, I feel a bit like I'm preaching to the choir, though. We've all heard this before, we all know these things and the proselytizers in the crowd already have their Bitcoin-centric responses all queued up. "Bitcoin is backed by math, not a government" or "No...

Shortly after finishing the article, it occurred to me that many of the same things can be said of another project I've got a deep interest in: Bitcoin. I wrote an article a while back about some exotic new transaction types clever folks were coming up with - ways to use Bitcoin that ...

I get asked about Bitcoin a lot - mining, usage, fundamental economic principles, basic technical details etc. I spend a lot of time telling people the things they need to know about Bitcoin to participate in this grand experiment of ours and almost as much time quieting unfounded fea...

The really sad part is, it's not even because we haven't got an answer - we dodge the question because it's a hard one to answer without a lot of economic pretext and de-programming. Most folks have been using government-issued fiat currency their whole lives. It has value to them bec...

I'm sure there's a vocal group who will decry these new stats as impossible and another sign of the impending collapse of the great "Butterfly Labs Ponzi" of 2012, while others will be excited about the potential for a free increase in hashrate and some final power figures. I'm sure t...

To put all these big numbers another way: Bitcoin uses the same sorts of encryption and intractable math problems for its security as most encryption elsewhere in the world. The key space and manner of generation is also similar to many other common encryption-based systems. If Bitcoi...

I posted about anything related to Butterfly Labs appears to have been pretty controversial: for the first time in the short history of this little blog, I actually had to disable comments on a post, which didn't really do much considering that my comments section was just the spill-o...

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While Bitcoin has been attempting to bring money into the modern age, it hasn't been alone. The Royal Canadian Mint has been hard at work developing their own digital transaction system called MintChip . It touts many of the cash-like features that Bitcoin merchants love and is backed...

Dissectiong the Bitcoin Double Spend Attack A paper has recently surfaced entitled "Two Bitcoins at the Price of One? Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin" which purports to have successfully crafted fraudulent double-spend transactions. It's an amazing paper and the vu...

Contrary to what the public records seem to indicate, he's not the CEO of BFL - Sonny Chris Vleisides is not the CEO, Chris Vleisides (his stepfather) is the President (as opposed to his natural father, James Ray Houston, who was listed on the indictment) and Nasser Ghoseiri is the CE...

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In 1845 French economist Claude Frédéric Bastiat penned what is now a fairly famous bit of political satire: The Candlemakers' Petition (French |English ). This took the form of a petition written to the French government by a body of candlestick makers and railed against protectionis...